Test of Metal p-4

by Mathew Stover

  From the goggle-eyed whiter-than-foam countenance Jace Beleren turned up in his direction, Nicol Bolas assumed he was now visible. And since there was nothing, at the moment, he could do to harm either one of them, he settled for a fang-filled grin.

  “Jace. Lovely to see you again. Lovely to…” He sniffed the air, broadened his grin, and sniffed again. “Is that fear? Delicious. If I were to, say, lunge at you suddenly, do you think you might wet your pants?”

  Why not? It was funny. To Bolas, anyway. Beleren didn’t seem amused, but there was no way to know for sure, as the mentalist’s response was a gurgle like a dragon choking on a griffin bone, followed hard upon by a magically enhanced sprint for the tree line.

  Bolas watched him go, and then he sighed. Diverting as this tiny episode had been, nothing had changed in his intolerable situation. He sighed again and looked down upon his tormentor. He said, “Partnership?”

  Tezzeret said, “Yes.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “It’s possible,” the artificer allowed. “A wasted question.”

  “Then a pertinent one. Why would I make a deal with you, much less keep it?”

  “Because you need me.”

  “Do I?”

  “No more games, Bolas. That’s over for us. I know you’re failing. Your faculties are degrading. You’ve aged more in the last ten years than in the last ten thousand. That’s the only reason I was able to do what I’ve done to you.”

  The dragon frowned down at the artificer. He had to admit the scrawny little scut worm had a point.

  “Listen to me: I don’t know what you’ve planned, but I know it’s big, and I suspect it is intended to repair your mind and rebuild your power. I also believe that your plan is going to involve a great deal of destruction, not to mention the deaths of many planeswalkers, including myself. This is where you and I have a problem. I’m not certain that you even know how destructive whatever you’re doing will be. As far as I can see, you might have passed your mental tipping point, and millions or billions may die for nothing at all. So I’m going to help you.”

  Bolas stared. “You may need to say that again.”

  “Think about what you’ve seen here, since you came. Think about what happened on the beach, and what you took from my mind. Bolas, I know it’s hard. Especially now. But think. What do you know?”

  The dragon lowered his head. “I know that you beat me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You could have killed me at any time since I arrived here. I have been completely at your mercy the entire time.”

  “Mercy,” he said, “is the greatest virtue.”

  “But you haven’t killed me. You expect to get some use out of me.”

  “Expect is too strong a word. But I am allowing for the possibility.”

  “Because… there is no such thing as trash-only materials you haven’t yet found a use for. Including me.”

  “Yes.”

  “This whole thing hasn’t been about you at all. It’s-you did all this-everything you have shown me, everything you have done to me, and everything you haven’t done to me… you…”

  Bolas felt the dawn of a sensation he could not identify. He wondered if it might be awe. “It was about me all along…”

  “Yes,” Tezzeret said. “Also all about me. At the same time. Curious, isn’t it?”

  “To prove that I can trust you… and find out if you can trust me…”

  Tezzeret shrugged. “Trust is too much to hope for between beings like us, Bolas. But you can believe I will not harm you unless you leave me no other choice. You can believe that I do not want you to kill billions, for good reason or otherwise, and I certainly don’t want you to kill me. I believe that you want so badly to be restored to your former glory that you will accept help. Even from me.”

  “So this…” Bolas began to understand the feeling of the metal whirl that had plagued Tezzeret in the Riddle Gate. “So this is about the fourth line.”

  “The last riddle,” Tezzeret said seriously. “The most important one; the one that requires the fourth trait of greatness in an artificer.”

  Bolas looked at him in silent query.

  “Insight,” Tezzeret said.

  “Whom do you rescue by slaying…”

  “Exactly. Whom do I rescue by slaying.” The artificer offered his hand. “I don’t want the answer to be you.”

  Bolas stared.

  He had never, in all his vast life, felt so wholly at a loss.

  “I suppose…” Bolas murmured. “I suppose… I don’t, either.” And to his own astonishment, he lowered one great talon and shook Tezzeret’s hand. “Though I’ll probably kill you anyway.”

  “But not today.”

  “Yes,” Bolas said. “Not today.”

  A moment later, he discovered something still troubled him. “But Crucius,” he said, waving a talon up at the Metal Sphinx. “That’s really him? The Mad Sphinx?”

  “Not really.”

  “Where is he, then?”

  Tezzeret said gravely, “Speaking.”

  Nicol Bolas felt as though all the air had turned to stone and all the stone was piled upon his chest. “You…?” he gasped. “You…?”

  “Of course not,” Tezzeret said, grinning at him. “But the look on your face? I will treasure that for the rest of my life. It will keep me warm through the long winter nights.”

  After a moment, Bolas discovered himself smiling as well. “All right, all right. Very well. But still-tell me.”

  “Say please.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Manners cost nothing, though their value is beyond gold. Or even etherium,” Tezzeret said. “If you like, Doc can teach you.”

  Bolas shook his head, and some fist in his chest, so old and tight and layered with scars that he had forgotten it had ever been there, now loosed and let him laugh outright.

  “Please, then,” he said, still chuckling, “tell me of finding Crucius.”

  “You’re standing on him. More or less.”

  “Really? This isn’t another joke?”

  “It’s not a joke, but it’s not really him, either. It used to be him, and if the Multiverse is lucky, it might be him again. Remember how I said that here, it’s always now? He was a clockworker. Will be a clockworker. Potentially. Probably the only clockworker I would actually trust to do clockworking.”

  “Was? Will be? Potentially what?”

  “It’s complicated. Things become other things. Seeds become plants. Drops become rivers. Eggs become dragons. But those transformations are a great deal more certain than anything that happens to, around, or concerning a clockworker. The same for me.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That Speaking bit was a joke before-but it’s also true. Sort of. Potentially true. Someday I may be him, or he may have been me. Formerly. Or both of us might be you. And vice versa. Or I’m what he turned into. And so forth. Like I said before…” Tezzeret shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “It’s true that there is no secret. It’s just that language is insufficient to express truth clearly. That’s why I decided it would be better to show you.”

  “But-” The dragon waved up toward the Metal Sphinx, and at the riddle engraved into the plinth. “What is all that, then? What’s with the statue?”

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “I, ah, well…”

  “The dynamic balance of intersecting arcs that makes it seem as though at any instant it might wake up, yawn, stretch, and take wing for any place-any time-in the Multiverse. The simple purity of it-he has taken the ugly necessities of blood and bone, of eating, shitting, screwing and decay, and transformed them into clean, spare lines of perfect elegance.”

  “Hmp,” the dragon said. To Bolas, the only thing more boring than art was listening to someone talk about art. “You sound as though you envy him.”

  “To become as he has become,” Tezzeret said serious
ly, “is my heart’s fondest dream.”

  “Why don’t you, then?” The great dragon gave a shrug that encompassed the whole world that was ocean. “In this place, you are master of all you survey. Literally. There is nothing in this entire universe that does not answer to your will. Not even me. If that’s what you want to be, you can just… be.”

  Tezzeret nodded. “I can.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “To be master of this place,” the artificer said precisely, “is not what I’m for.”

  “What, some kind of higher-calling crap? Really? You expect me to believe that?”

  “You can believe that I believe it.” Tezzeret scooped up a handful of the etherium sand and let it trickle through his fingers. “You’ve heard of finding God in a grain of sand? Here, it’s the literal truth. This place is its own master. There is nothing here that is not part of its own creator. Including me.”

  “But I made you.”

  Tezzeret shrugged. “Who made you?”

  “Let’s not go there, can we?”

  “I don’t expect you to really understand this. I’m not sure I really understand it. Crucius thought he had an answer to existence-he thought he understood himself, the Multiverse, and his place in it. This place is what he became after he found out he was wrong.”

  Tezzeret looked up into the face of the Metal Sphinx as though it were looking back at him. “I don’t know if he decided there was no answer, or if he simply realized that whatever answer there was, he wasn’t the one who could find it. So he set out to design and build someone who was.”

  Bolas snorted. “You?”

  “Not me personally. Someone who can do what I have done. Who can become what I’ve become. Someone who can reach this place, understand what it is, and realize that the real Search is only now beginning.”

  The dragon sighed and let his heavy lids droop across his vast yellow eyes. The only thing duller than talking about art was mystical claptrap and gnostic flummery. “What about that riddle, though? Where did Crucius learn Classical Draconic-and how in any flavor of hell did you learn to read it?”

  “Oh, it’s not. It’s whatever language you know best. As for the riddle, I wrote it.” He shrugged and gave a tired sigh. “That is, I’m going to write it. The Seeker will. Someday. Currently, I presume that Seeker will be me. Of course, I didn’t know I wrote it-will write it, whatever-until after I solved it. Inconvenient. But probably better that way.”

  “So? What’s the answer?”

  Tezzeret smiled. “I am the carmot.”

  “Really? That’s it? That’s the thunderbolt of enlightenment that turned you into… whatever in the hells you are? ‘I am the carmot’?”

  “Not at all. I am the carmot; you are an ill-mannered dragon with an unfortunate impulse control problem.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Tezzeret shrugged. “Watch.”

  He reached into the tangles of his hair and brought out a needle of sangrite about one-fourth the size of his little finger. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said, and stabbed the sangrite into his left eye.

  His face burst into flame. The fire swiftly spread to the rest of his body, and his head… vanished.

  Bolas scowled. The stump of Tezzeret’s neck showed a clean, smooth surface, exactly the color of etherium. A moment later, Tezzeret’s head wiped itself back into existence.

  His left eye, along with its lid, its socket, and a diagonal band that extended across his face from his hairline above his right eye to his jaw at the left corner of his mouth, was now metal, metal the color of burnished pewter…

  He batted away what was left of the smoke. “Sorry about the odor.”

  “Not at all,” Bolas said. “You forget whom you’re talking to.”

  “Of course. Well, here,” Tezzeret said, then stuck his thumb into the corner of his etherium eye socket and gouged out his etherium eye. He flinched, just a bit, as it came free. “Damn, that smarts. Here. This is my gift to you.”

  He tossed his eyeball to an astonished Nicol Bolas, who bobbled it for a second or two before getting a solid grip. He held it up to inspect it.

  Solid etherium. Pure. And indescribably precious, not in money, but in power. “Impressive.”

  By the time he looked back at Tezzeret, the artificer had an eye of flesh in his etherium socket to match the one on the opposite side of his nose. He winked his brand-new eye at the dragon. “This is my body, broken for you. More or less.”

  “So it’s you,” Nicol Bolas said, a bit breathlessly. “You are the carmot…”

  “As I just told you.”

  “You’ll forgive me for being surprised.” A Planeswalker who can create etherium? Exactly why he’d been after Crucius in the first place. Power. Unlimited power. It was only a question of stuffing Tezzeret someplace he couldn’t get out of, and his problems would be more than half solved. “I have underestimated you, indeed,” he murmured appreciatively. Now it was only a matter of finding a workaround for this blasted device in his head, and-

  “That will be all for now,” Tezzeret said. “I’ll be back in a day or two. Just to check on you. Make sure everything’s all right.”

  “As if I’ll still be here? I’m leaving now.”

  “No. You’re not.” He sounded disturbingly certain.

  “How do you mean?”

  “This place is, in one crucial respect, very like the Riddle Gate. You can’t take etherium out of here.”

  “Very well.” Bolas cast the eye aside without hesitation-after all, he had a line on an unlimited supply-and he reached out to rip his way into the Blind Eternities.

  But reality did not rip.

  He tried again, disbelieving, and once more in desperation, and then he wheeled, staring in horror at the artificer, who spread his hands and shrugged apologetically.

  “You must not have been paying very close attention to my problem in the Riddle Gate,” he said. “For beings such as yourself-such as I once was-leaving here is… difficult. But I’ll give you this hint for free: the metal is easy to discard. Discarding your desire for it is a much more difficult operation.”

  “You’re making this up!” Bolas breathed, hating the edge of desperation he heard in his own voice.

  “Funny how people keep saying that to me.”

  “This is another of your stupid jokes! It has to be!”

  “Compliments on the humor of the situation should be directed to Crucius-but under the circumstances, I am happy to accept them in his place.” He turned and began to walk away along the beach.

  “Wait! You can’t just leave me here!”

  “Of course I can.” Tezzeret stopped, and now looked over his shoulder at the dragon. “In fact, I have to. Away from this place, my powers are as limited as they have ever been. It wouldn’t be a heartbeat before you’d have me shackled and stuffed in your deepest dungeon. Which I would prefer to avoid. And as I said, I’ll be back in a day or two. Then we can start work on your problem. Together.”

  “Where could you possibly be going that is remotely as important as getting me out of here?”

  “I’m going to spend some time with my father,” he said, and with a single step passed beyond the bounds of the universe.

  THE METAL ISLAND

  ENTER LEVIATHAN

  Nicol Bolas settled himself onto the etherium sand. At last he could begin to excise the artificer’s annoying little gimmicks and get himself out of here. “Damn, I thought he’d never leave.”

  “You and me both, brother.”

  Bolas lurched upright. The voice had been impossibly deep, impossibly dark, and most of all, impossibly close.

  Behind him was a rip in the fabric of the universe, held open by some impressively sizable talons. Bolas gathered himself into a crouch-talons like those usually belonged to dragons, and from their dimensions, it wasn’t impossible that this new planeswalking dragon, whoever it was, might be even larger than Bolas himself. “Take it easy, pal,” the new drag
on said. “I’m not here to fight.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re not,” Bolas growled, “because you have no idea who you’re about to-”

  “It’s more the other way around,” the new dragon said as he shouldered his way into the world. He stopped, stretched, and gaped his great fanged mouth wide in a jaw-cracking yawn.

  Nicol Bolas stared in uncomprehending astonishment. “You-you look just like me!”

  “That’s more the other way around, too.” The dragon grinned down at him, and Bolas realized that despite the resemblance, this dragon was vastly larger than he was, and younger, and possessed of a staggering magnitude of power that Bolas could only faintly glimpse. All his senses, magical as well as physical, told him that this dragon was so powerful he shouldn’t be able to even exist…

  Nothing in his twenty-five thousand years of life had prepared him to face a being like this. “You-are you-who-I mean, what? What’s going on? It’s as if you’re me.”

  “I am you,” the new dragon said with a vast and gleaming fang-filled grin. “You’re the one who’s not you.”

  “What?”

  “Nice job with Tezzeret, by the way. You learn a lot about someone by how he treats you when he’s got nothing to fear. And now we’ve got him working for us willingly. Enthusiastically. Hells, he thinks he’s doing us a favor.”

  Bolas still couldn’t quite get his mind around what was happening, though a terrible dread had begun to curdle in his gut. “Us? What do you mean, us?”

  “Oh, well, there’s that, I suppose.” The dragon waved a talon in languid dismissal. “By us, you should understand that I mean me. There is no you. Not really.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I know, you’re having a hard time with this,” the other dragon said sympathetically. “There’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that constructs like you have a pretty limited useful life span. You start to break down only a day or two after you’re created. You must have noticed how it’s gotten harder and harder to think.”

  “Constructs? Like me?” Bolas shook his head wildly, as though he could jerk himself awake from this terrible nightmare. “You’re saying I’m… that I’ve always been…”